Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Back in July we published this blog post denoting how we had noticed FireFox's marketshare was rising vs. Internet Explorer, at least in terms of visits to our own web site. While the data is not very scientific (considering official marketshare numbers for FireFox are around 20% while Internet Explorer is at about 70-75%) we thought it would be interesting to post some more information about what we have witnessed since that time. So here goes:

The number of visitors using FireFox has crept up, while for the first time in our company's history, FEWER THAN 50% of visits came from Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. Here are the stats from September 2008 (so far) and August:

September (1st-16th)

Explorer 46.8%FireFox 36.4%Safari 9%*

*we sell a lot of Mac equipment, so Safari visits will be much higher than average, and this no doubt impacts the Internet Explorer number as well.

August

Explorer 51.7%FireFox 34%Safari 6.4%

It will be interesting to see if the launch of Google's "Chrome" web browser last week will chip away Microsoft's lead even further. We don't believe that our stats programs will register Chrome visitors as actually using Chrome though, probably their visits will show up in the "other" percentage column. We should still be able to get some good data from that column though, considering visits from "other" browsers currently register at just 0.2%. Should that column spike, we can likely attribute that to Google Chrome.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Okay, we're in the tech field and we get excited whenever some new Web 2.0 product or service comes along, but the excitement is usually short lived. Whatever product it is, whether it is a new social networking site or a new email program, usually has enough flaws to keep it from getting more than once glance from most people including us.

This past week Google launched their own web browser called "Chrome" as a competitor to other browsers on the market (Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, and Apple's Safari browser). Google says the browser is enhanced for Web 2.0 activities like watching videos and viewing photos. We had a chance to take the browser for a test drive recently, to complete basic tasks such as going to various web sites, search engines, and of course completing activities on eBay.

Our conclusion? We didn't use the browser for all the Web 2.0 things that Google says it would be great for, so we are not really qualified to give an indepth review of the browser's features. That being said, as far as basic Internet use, the browser definitely has more of a "Web 2.0" look to it than other browser on the market, but other than that the functionality and speed are about the same (except when compared to Internet Explorer of course, which is a known memory hog).